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Senior administration officials tell The New York Times that the U.S. is actually considering the idea of a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan before the official 2014 pull out.

The campaign has been fraught with recent disappointment, from the failure of peace talks in Doha, Qatar, and what seems to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation. To make matters worse, the consistent and growing intransigence of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has now led officials to lean on the less popular "zero option" — complete withdrawal.

“There’s always been a zero option, but it was not seen as the main option,” said a senior Western official in Kabul to the Times. “It is now becoming one of them, and if you listen to some people in Washington, it is maybe now being seen as a realistic path.”

Leaving the country isn't so easy though. First, the logistics alone would be a nightmare. Like Iraq, the U.S. is likely to leave several billion dollars worth of equipment behind.

Furthermore, the security agreement with Pakistan is likely to be a sticking point. Many analysts say Pakistan has grown to depend on American military assistance.

Furthermore, recent Taliban attacks on the capital, on judges, and even on schools, prompt one to believe that the extremist group is poised now more than ever to take over once the U.S. leaves.

The final question comes down to Afghan security forces: are they really ready to take over, or is the confidence coming from military leaders just more smoke and mirrors?

Senior administration officials tell The New York Times that the U.S. is actually considering the idea of a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan before the official 2014 pull out.

The campaign has been fraught with recent disappointment, from the failure of peace talks in Doha, Qatar, and what seems to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation. To make matters worse, the consistent and growing intransigence of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has now led officials to lean on the less popular "zero option" — complete withdrawal.

“There’s always been a zero option, but it was not seen as the main option,” said a senior Western official in Kabul to the Times. “It is now becoming one of them, and if you listen to some people in Washington, it is maybe now being seen as a realistic path.”

Leaving the country isn't so easy though. First, the logistics alone would be a nightmare. Like Iraq, the U.S. is likely to leave several billion dollars worth of equipment behind.

Furthermore, the security agreement with Pakistan is likely to be a sticking point. Many analysts say Pakistan has grown to depend on American military assistance.

Furthermore, recent Taliban attacks on the capital, on judges, and even on schools, prompt one to believe that the extremist group is poised now more than ever to take over once the U.S. leaves.

The final question comes down to Afghan security forces: are they really ready to take over, or is the confidence coming from military leaders just more smoke and mirrors?

Nothing like the impending footage of desperate refugees clinging to the landing gear of the last helicopter off of the embassy to drive home the failure of American power. On the plus side, many Progressives will have a nice nostalgia buzz from the sight of America in defeat.

Nothing like the impending footage of desperate refugees clinging to the landing gear of the last helicopter off of the embassy to drive home the failure of American power. On the plus side, many Progressives will have a nice nostalgia buzz from the sight of America in defeat.

Is it just me...or does someone seem hell bent on implementing policy that ensures we're back in Iraq AND Afghanistan again within the next decade?

Is it just me...or does someone seem hell bent on implementing policy that ensures we're back in Iraq AND Afghanistan again within the next decade?

He doesn't see it that way. To the Progressive mind, if America isn't involved in a crisis, it isn't a crisis, and if we are backing one side in a conflict, they automatically assume that the other side is the good guy. If Israel had been a Soviet client, leftists would have advocated mass deportations of Palestinians (notice that they never said a word about communist genocide against whole populations within the USSR, PRC, etc.), and Bill Buckley used to joke with Pinochet that if he announced that he was a leftist revolutionary, the left would have hailed Chile as a model of economic prosperity under a fellow Proglodyte. Obama's support for Chavez, the Iranian regime, Morsi, etc., and his disdain for our allies is just par for the course. He and his fellow travelers see the US as the source of instability in the world, because we are the heirs to the European colonial mindset. The logical outcome of this is that if America withdraws from the world, then the indigenous peoples can go back to their bucolic, pre-industrial existence, with low carbon footprints, picturesque poverty and massive subsidies of First World tax dollars to make up the differences in the standards of living. You know, like the massive aid that we poured into Afghanistan in 2000 when they had a food crisis. Their gratitude was felt the following year when they harbored Bin Laden and his fellow 9/11 conspirators.

There are only two options with a place like Afghanistan. You either have to move in with overwhelming force and keep it there to ruthlessly impose civilized order over a period of generations until the bulk of the population has actually grown up under civilized conditions and therefore finds it 'Normal,' or you can go in to kill people and blow shit up that you find annoying and then split until the next time you have to repeat the drill. Post-War American political processes pretty much guarantee that we'll never go the first route on that one.

The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration was wildly wrong about how much everyone else in the world wants to live in a Western democracy, a fallacy embedded in both Democrat and Republican ideologies, and which continues into the Obozo administration (Witness the Arab Spring and the fruits of the harvest in Benghazi).

There are a few places where that ill-conceived ideology will work somewhat, but the Islamic world doesn't contain any of them. Even in those places where it has some chance of success, like Central America, the results tend to be far to the left of anything that's good for the US, since unlike North America and Europe the rest of the world has a whole lot more population than it does diversified economic strength, so there is always a very high risk that a populist demagogue will simply become President For Life in any country that tries it, like Chavez in Venezuela, and set about suppressing any opposition.